The moral economy of mobile phones: Pacific Islands perspectives

A Handset Dangling in a Doorway: Mobile Phone Sharing in a Rural Sepik Village (Papua New Guinea) / David Lipset -- HIV, Phone Friends and Affective Technology in Papua New Guinea / Holly Wardlow -- Toby and 'the Mobile System': Apocalypse and Salvation in Papua New Guinea's Wireless Network / Dan Jorgensen -- Creating Consumer-Citizens: Competition, Tradition and the Moral Order of the Mobile Telecommunications Industry in Fiji / Heather A. Horst -- 'Working the Mobile': Giving and Spending Phone Credit in Port Vila, Vanuatu / Daniela Kraemer -- Top-Up: The Moral Economy of Prepaid Mobile Phone Subscriptions / Robert J. Foster -- Discussion. Affective Technologies in the Age of Creative Destruction / Jeffrey Mantz -- Transforming Place, Time and Person?: Mobile Telephones and Changing Moral Economies in the Western Pacific / Margaret Jolly

The moral economy of mobile phones implies a field of shifting relations among consumers, companies and state actors, all of whom have their own ideas about what is good, fair and just. These ideas inform the ways in which, for example, consumers acquire and use mobile phones; companies promote and sell voice, SMS and data subscriptions; and state actors regulate both everyday use of mobile phones and market activity around mobile phones. Ambivalence and disagreement about who owes what to whom is thus an integral feature of the moral economy of mobile phones. This volume identifies and evaluates the stakes at play in the moral economy of mobile phones. The six main chapters consider ethnographic cases from Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Vanuatu. The volume also includes a brief introduction with background information on the recent 'digital revolution' in these countries and two closing commentaries that reflect on the significance of the chapters for our understanding of global capitalism and the contemporary Pacific